Social innovation initiatives as design actions within the public space: lesson learnt from a number of case studies in Italy

This article discusses a set of Italian case studies about the use of public space, building upon the workdeveloped within the ‘State of the art’, the first part of the EU Research Human City (2014-2018). We start from the hypothesis that these case studies are social innovation initiatives and express a diversified use of design. Here is why, building upon a framework developed by Manzini (2014/b) we attempt to classify case studies as actual ‘design actions’ having different purposes and to understand how expert and diffuse design (Manzini, 2015) are interwoven. Finally we propose a reflection about the use of public space as a ‘prototyping space’ for social innovation, where design knowledge, methodology and tools may contribute in creating a new collective confidence in the possibility of changing things